Interactions in the Urban Environment

I'm still researching into interactions in the urban environment for my project in the Summer. I read The street as platform by Dan Hill at City of Sound.

I really liked the narrative account he portrayed to describe the "data cloud" that has become invisible to us as we go about our daily lives.

"We can’t see how the street is immersed in a twitching, pulsing cloud of data. This is over and above the well-established electromagnetic radiation, crackles of static, radio waves conveying radio and television broadcasts in digital and analogue forms, police voice traffic. This is a new kind of data, collective and individual, aggregated and discrete, open and closed, constantly logging impossibly detailed patterns of behaviour. The behaviour of the street.

Such data emerges from the feet of three friends, grimly jogging past, whose Nike+ shoes track the frequency and duration of every step, comparing against pre-set targets for each individual runner. This is cross-referenced with playlist data emerging from their three iPods. Similar performance data is being captured in the engine control systems of a stationary BMW waiting at a traffic light, beaming information back to the BMW service centre associated with the car’s owner."

It was a fascinating read, and reminded me of some science fiction writing, like Snow Crash, which I read a couple of years ago in relation to an undergrad project on the future of interactive entertainment. However, as Dan states, this is not fictional and the technology described is either already in place, or could be used for the concepts illustrated. 

It is interesting how he mentions that systems will be rarely used if they are not adequate or suitable for the user's needs:

"An on-street information kiosk stands beside the screen, offering a scrollable map of the local area and directory of local businesses. It’s little-used, as the directory of businesses was always incomplete and intermittently updated, its data now rusty and eroded by time."